by Blake Butler
Years had come, the years were coming, the years had went again, the years were years.
The days inside the years were ours to live in and we had lived in them and now did not.
Or did we live in them again, in repetition. I can’t remember. There was the heaving sky.
There was tonight: the excess weight of missing color in the silent locks of empty homes.
The days of us destroyed. Days beaten as with hammers by the hands we do not have.
Homes so thick there was no longer air between them, as hours passed and disappeared.
The spectators and the actors. I can feel you in here even still. Feel you watching, taking.
Even with your body, you have a body. You can be harmed still. Erased from forever.
Yes, yes, in death, any of us is every inch as open as any had been ever, and even softer.
I encourage you not to breathe at all without the mask on. Also do not: open your eyes.
The kind of light remaining, which you will never touch, destroys all living memory.
Anywhere I look in here I can’t see anywhere inside here, wracked with its starvation.
The void of our history has been colonized, conditioned. It is desperate. It wants to fuck.
I hear machines. I see the sea replicating in its nothing, pushing sand against the sand.
I cannot be the machines. I cannot reach the sea. I can’t find where what was waiting.
The sand doesn’t miss anything about what bodies did upon it, nor does all nature.
I am alive inside this tape. Everything I was is still outside the tape. The tape repeats.
I saw two bears beat the shit out of each other and they were still there the next day.
I don’t want this and it doesn’t want me. My video-body resists supplying what I need.
Teeth fall out of my head sometimes from all the shaking but then I get new teeth.
My hands are larger than my hands were ever. My aorta snorts my blood like drugs.
Some days in here I get up and it’s the day I got up into the day before again.
I do the same things I did the day before because I have to to get to where I am today.
Where’s that.
Where’s what. Who are you. What.
Where are you today I mean. Are you happy.
Does it matter.
It probably matters. Yes.
I’ll have you know I killed myself.
How did you kill yourself.
By getting older. By letting me get older. By going on. And I still am.
Do you regret it.
I can’t remember.
* * *
FLOOD: See how that happened? The interruption? I can remember it right now, the words that had just been spoken through me, in the film. That the tape can be switched out of makes me think there’s not wholly nothing left to live with. Though usually within minutes of my being able again to talk freely inside my mind I will forget exactly what has gone on in the tape here in between. I believe this is a feature of self-preservation of the nature of my present brain state, beyond the dead. The other thing about that time is, as you might have noticed, there is something other on the tape in there with me too. Someone speaking back toward me in bold font from inside me, inside the version of my brain the tape controls. I can hear it in my chest and in the air I’m breathing. It is as if this person can hear the scripted thinking in the contained space of the tape and answer back, can hear me when I respond, though my responses are also scripted. I don’t think this other person can still hear me when I am talking as I am now. I don’t know who this person is. I think it only familiar because I have heard it already several thousand times repeated. And yet already now I realize I can’t remember what inside the tape I’m doing or what the words were beyond the fact that they were said. I do remember having tried to kill myself, by the way, or at least trying to kill the me in this recording. I’ve thrown myself off a bridge. I have thrown myself off a roof and from a building. I have taken thousands of many different kinds of pills. I’ve used knives and ropes and guns and other manners of destruction. If you were in here alone I think you might have tried at least once too. Though each time when I die I just end up where I began, rolled in the smoke, and again the smoke resolves into the world alone. I admit I do like hearing the woman. It makes me feel clearer, as if sometimes inside the tape there is somewhere to want to be, unless being dead feels just the same as living, or if every minute in the tape is the beginning of another life. Only in these glitches I can remember the world before now, the world we shared, even if I don’t know how I got from there to here, or what could be coming for me now, forever.
The land of America was catacombs, but without bodies. Even better in our absence I could see upon the land again the shape of where we had lived off the dirt. The sloping earth cupped runoff from the hills of houses held above it, the walls of these here tilted toward where in years before the children would eat and play on in the image of their begetters; eggs had been hidden several Easters running for the chocolate and the coins, some still hidden; later in the nights the older children might have come to lie upon the nook of something simple with their hands up one another’s skirts, or simply spread out on a blanket to see a disc move black across the moon.
The absence of the people on the land here was written over by what grew in behind it. Nowhere the cords of backbones and pillared skull shifts missing refracted on the dry air overrun with centuries of cigarettes and cash and floppy hate sex and grieving terror. Where the bodies did not have to persist now, days smelled better and doors did not open and plants began to grow over the mucus of the interminable graves, erupting in white opera a leak of the song of thriving air all hot with something unlike people. Mites that once would have eaten out our eyes instead went into their own ways to purr in the white sun choked against a thicker plank of netting, our continuity disregarded. The grass unburied rose, licked and whispered at the homes’ faces like pubic hair around a hundred million dicks.
No one needs you, the dream was saying. There is always something.
The homes alone hid everything we believed we could be completely carried on by. The gorgeous clothes clapped in the closets, replicated for endless forms of bodies, went on in the dark and wore their own lives. No object itself actually believed in what it had been envisioned to embody. Death already understood and so did not require the cooperation of gloves and quilts and books and urns and knives and wire, or even trees or nests or glass or lengths of cold air left hanging in a pasture without marking. You didn’t have to see or name the essence of anything to feel it trying to continue without us. The walls of every inch seemed thicker even just knowing what they were forced to contain, a future without new blood: phantoms not of us but ideas of time still caught counting among the homes and days we’d been in where there was nothing left to be now. Both as if we still were there and had never been, leaving the air unconsumed to clap around itself and squirt from centers a waking layer in which something else would be spread onward and licked upon the landscape.
Streets grew longer than the earth beneath. Doors would open from a surface and nothing coming through or going on. Stock rose and fell inside the peace, making warmth in which an aging color grew, sermonizing and baptizing and giving thanks sung in the floors of the homes of the American unveiling of a graveyard in which I alone was left to walk, trapped for no reason other than that I insisted, wanting only anything like what I had once, and felt and held dear, and now can hardly separate inside my mind from feeling ill, despite knowing through and through that I was someone once who in my dreams could never die, and so never was my body, and never aged a day, despite eternity, like how often in the light of certain other eras for hours and hours we would sing all together the same words, celebrating the mark of the word of the end of the door of the day toward our disappearing hope.
* * *
FLOOD: I knew I wasn’t even me. I knew the land that let me tou
ch it was only an idea. And yet what choice did I have but to go on. To look for anything to hold fast or wait to be absorbed by. If others were alive inside here with me, I could not find them. I had the sense at once of being followed and following someone else who could feel me following but could not find me. Often I would turn around to look back where I had just come and see nothing but the same stretch I saw looking the same way, as if I were standing where a mirror was. As if I myself were the mirror reflecting two halves of a world with no one in it but the shit everyone but me had left behind. Who else could I have ever been. Sometimes again the smoke of the beginning of the world as I understood my appearance in it would appear, rolling over the long horizon far off and coming over. I imagine this meant there could be another face like mine somewhere out there ejecting the hell of the black of the smoke that comprised exactly what confined me. But as soon as I saw and understood the smoke this way, it rolled apart. It would spread and flesh out so generally into the distance I couldn’t tell it from the sky or whatever stood behind the sky or any of the houses that from here just looked like nothing but more indeterminate color. Whoever could have been there waiting to find me became again as nowhere as any stretch of air behind a wall. And the same of me to them. To even just the idea of them, anybody.
The years came and came on me again. They came and came on me. They held me.
The years did. They loved me. I could see out through the screens. I watched you dying.
In every inch of the zilch of nowhere I could see out into everything you lived through.
You looked gorgeous. Don’t fret about it. You did something with your life that hung.
All eyes did. They wore the same color, in spite of how they seemed to vary or shift.
The oceans of red money spilled for hours in the furor of the gnaw of dying laughter.
Blood poured forever in your mind. You were dead before you understood the idea.
The humans died and didn’t realize any better. They couldn’t feel the difference.
I wish I’d known you better than I do. The machines took you apart upon the dirt.
Your organs were ribbed with words. I couldn’t read what all the words said at all.
Your body became buried under bodies, which were buried under grass that grew.
That’s what I believe love is: doing something again because it’s still there and is and is.
I don’t know where all the other bodies went. I used to know a couple people. Persons.
Friends and family. Salesmen. What. They lit me up. I didn’t know they lit me then.
I didn’t see the cracks dry in my whole flesh until there was no flesh left to press against.
I am thirty-one years old. Some day soon I will turn to thirty-two, though I am dead.
Is that a good thing or a bad thing.
What, the being dead, or my new birthday.
Either.
Yes. Yes it’s a good thing. And I need you.
I need you, too. Hold me.
You know I can’t.
I did not know that. No day goes past without you wholly of my whole mind.
What does it feel like to think you have a mind still?
It’s all right.
Can you show me?
I cannot show you.
Why. Why can’t you.
I can’t do anything but see.
* * *
FLOOD: I don’t think being inside this tape means I am here forever, or that I have to be. I don’t think I am not in some way living, though I seem now to be the only one. Even the voice is not a person here before me, with legs and arms and eyes and someone’s face. I’ve walked for so long among the buildings and the fields here in search of any shape still taking breath like me. But they all killed each other. They are all ended. They are all stacked up in thick piles. I don’t want to think about it, not when all I have to think about when I can’t actually think is what there isn’t versus what there never was.
I already knew I needed out. Though I couldn’t feel anything in the grain it was the feeling of no feeling that burned worse, and knowing that underneath that there must be something silent and corroded lacing through what I was meant to use as a human to understand another person. That there was no one here to apply that understanding to made it a weapon against itself, a private bloodbath where whatever what my blood was now should have been pumping, filling my organs with inspiration. Wherever anyone wasn’t now forever was space that pounded at my lack of awareness of the pounding, bruising anything remaining of what I’d been or was beyond the point of any recognition. The houses and the wires and the pixels in the sky didn’t want me to do anything but not take part in my own image.
Worse than knowing I needed out, I didn’t know what I needed back out into. Even when I could feel there was something else beyond the edges of any color in the street or window where no one waited even to just totally ignore me, I couldn’t recognize it enough to know how to want it harder. Along each street it was as if I were waiting for some hole to swallow my face. Each moment it didn’t made the going into the next step that much less worth doing. This is what life had always felt like. In my mind, expecting the absence of something or someone there before me made the presence in its place feel like the punch line to a routine no one was performing. And where I couldn’t find a way to laugh, I became my own stand-in, over and over, like painting white over a window from the inside.
None of this stopped me from believing every instant that the entire condition of my existence was going to change at any minute. Every edge of door or floor before or beneath me could be the initiation of an entirely different fate. In any foyer beyond any location someone could be standing with their face against the wall waiting to hear me coming. The sky could always split right down the middle.
* * *
FLOOD: Why were there no bodies. There were only the buildings and the ground. Everything was covered in a dark hue as if held on in night during the day. Many doors and windows had been sealed into the surfaces around them. The world was empty of us, except for me, cleared as to a land inside an amusement park that’d closed its doors. I don’t know what I would have done with the bodies but I wanted to see them, even to be them. I wanted to remember they were there. Through my own vision on the tape, though, often all I could see for miles set in the land were the wrecked remains of what still had the balls to cling to the idea of us returning, the bridges and the doors and hallways built as if from bone and sinew, though in a guise that even I here inside the clearer thinking could no longer recognize the purpose of. Which makes me wonder now what else is less clear to me here than I imagine, what has not transferred between the seeming many ideas of me that I am, all split apart and up under trance. What about you, for instance? Whoever I am speaking this to, if anybody. Why won’t you respond?
Sometimes my skull burns in my head. It hurts to say the words here. Every of them.
Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. This is me talking. Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. Ouch.
I feel confused. I feel as if I’m being followed. I feel as if my time is bleeding from me.
There is everywhere to go. In the new days I go from room to room in the houses.
I go into people’s homes. I see what they were there. I lie down in their beds.
I eat their food. I sometimes am their food entirely, seeing them above me, eating.
I want to be eaten. I want out. There is a hole here somewhere. There is a way back.
Into the dead, who have a spirit, whereas I feel like rubber under water, in a vise.
Death, in preservation, burns worse than being burned to die and enter light.
I still want everything I ever wanted and maybe even more now that only I exist.
I want silence beyond the word. Whereas here, in memory, stillness is loudest.
In the houses people haunt the years with ways they used to walk when they had skin.
Their mind will come up to me here inside their house and open
their life against me.
I can feel their blood pummel. The noise the days suffused inside them is hellish shit.
No eye has ever died. It goes on seeing. I don’t want to go on seeing. I want nothing.
Some rooms will feel against me so familiar it’s as if I’ve been there my whole life.
As if when I go to sleep I’m in the rooms again and all the people are there with me.